Fundamentally, people have an innate desire to survive and prosper. Because an individual does not have the relative capacity to survive and prosper independently, it is highly desirable that people be able to communicate effectively with each other. This is done by exchanging messages in the form of signals (e.g., voice, written text, etc.) These messages typically consist of the message content, its context, the time to deliver and the cost to send the message. The effectiveness of the message to a specific audience is a function of these factors. The value of the message itself to the sender is its relative utility (the contribution the sending of the message makes to their perception of well being). This value is based largely on actions taken (or not taken) by the recipient of the message. Enormous effort has been directed to maximizing the value of this function, which we refer to as the messaging value function.
Individual success is often based on the ability for the individual to transact in its social network (the marketplace) in order to trade cooperation, information, favors, goods and services to survive and prosper economically. This ability is highly dependent on this messaging value function.
As technology has evolved, the range of parameters (the space of possibilities) for this function has changed greatly. For example, with written communication such as e-mail and instant messaging, time and cost to send a message have decreased towards zero. On the other hand, the relative return of value of the message itself has changed by a much lesser degree. However, context, i.e., the environment in which the message is received, has increased in entropy. The number and variety of messages have altered the perception of the recipient and the cost of processing of each message. In many cases listeners are more distrustful, busy and jaded which reduces the relative value of the message content, time and cost being equal.
Spoken language, writing, mail, printing, telegraph, telephone, television, electronic mail and the Internet have derived their immense value and impact to their ability to affect this messaging value function. What each of these did was primarily reduce the time and cost of the distribution of the message. With the exception of language each has had a far less significant impact on the message content and its context.
Furthermore, in many cases, individual messages have been considered in isolation. Messages in typical cases occur in a network and the have a cumulative and interactive effect. Reductions in messaging cost and time have resulted in an increase in messages. The increase of messages has resulted in competition amongst messages for time and action on behalf of the recipient. As the number of messages has increased, the time potentially available for a recipient to react to each one decreased. Many messages are disseminated to a group of recipients at a time. This one to many communication multiplies the effect of the average message processing time.
The net effect is that while cost and time of distribution has gone toward zero, the relative value of the content of the message has gone down. In addition, the influence of the environment of the message has largely been negative as it relates to the volume of messages, excluding consideration in the trust and receptiveness aspect of the environment which has increased globally.
The area of marginal value for improvements in the messaging value function is primarily in the message and the environment, not in the cost or time of distribution. This is due to the much larger inefficiencies and range in the message itself and the environment, compared to cost and time improvements.
In addition, the network effect also may alter the message processing time. A recipient has a finite amount of time available to read and process messages. The more messages recipients receive, on average, the lesser amount of time they have to give attention to individual messages. Recipients then typically develop screening strategies to focus their energy on the more important messages. If one can reduce the overall number of messages a recipient receives, the messaging value function may increase. If messages stand out from others to be screened by the recipient as more important, the value of the messaging value function may increase.
By way of example, many decisions in an individual's daily life are ones for which advice, opinions, or direction from others is useful or necessary. When choosing what college is best for a child, a person may benefit from the advice of parents whose children are in college. When moving a design into production, an engineer may need the approval of several managers. A disk jockey preparing for a wedding may seek input from wedding participants and guests on what songs should be played at the wedding. In these situations, seeking advice or approval from others individually can be time-consuming, inefficient, and often inexact.
Using e-mail or instant messaging, a person may send out a question to a large number of potential responders at once. By writing about a question on a blog, or posting a question to a web service such as Yahoo® Answers, a person may enable the public to respond in comments posted to the blog or to the web service. Yahoo® is a registered trademark of Yahoo! Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif. Search engines allow a user to search for opinions relevant to his or her decision. All of these approaches have flaws, however. All require manual aggregation of the responses. In the case of blog comments, web services such as Yahoo® Answers, or search engine results, the trustworthiness of the information returned may be difficult to assess, in part because the respondents self-select, and because they may not self-select on the basis of expertise. Only e-mail and instant messaging allow the user to target a particular set of recipients with his or her question. As mentioned, however, both e-mail and instant messaging currently represent an overwhelming torrent of user-generated content and communications that is unstructured and qualitative. A focus on trust and collaboration is desirable in social networks as lives move online.
Another drawback of current systems is that they may require users who wish to collaborate in many cases to register, download, or share in advance a software module. This condition precedent may be inefficient in that it adds a step to the collaboration process, and may discourage some from interacting.
Further, in order to ask follow-up questions, a user must often generate new questions without the benefit of the context of the prior questions.
Based on the foregoing, it would be highly desirable to improve the relative value of the message content and its environment. By way of one example only, it would be advantageous to be a system that builds upon prior questions and suggests follow-up questions based on prior questions in a thread, and allows a user to share questions and receive answers in an efficient, prescribed format within a trusted circle or group of recipients.